Director

Writer

The
infrequency of the Western genre tempts viewers to give new ones every possible
benefit of the doubt on the theory that even a half-good example is better than
none at all. So, even while "Echoes
of War" wasn't really working for me for quite a while, I found myself
still hoping against hope that it would turn itself around and make up for the
awkwardness in the early going. Eventually, I finally had to concede to myself
that, despite my best efforts, I could not see it as anything more than a giant
bore that presents viewers with the most familiar plot devices imaginable but
fails to present them in a way that makes them worth sitting through once
again.

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Set in a
rural area of Texas just after the end of the Civil War, the story opens as
former Confederate soldier Wade (James Badge Dale) returns to the home
belonging to his late sister's husband, Seamus (Ethan Embry), and their family
to recover from the horrors that he has seen. The Rileys survive by trapping
animals on their property and eating the meat while selling the pelts, a meager
existence that has become all the more so since their next-door neighbors, the
McCluskeys—a once-rich and powerful
family of cattle ranchers that has fallen on hard times since the army seized
their livestock for the war effort—have now taken to raiding the
traps and stealing the animals they have caught. Although Seamus and the others
are content to simply let it slide, Wade is not so easygoing and pays a visit
to the patriarch of the McCluskey clan, Randolph (William Forsythe, to ask him
politely to knock it off, and you can no doubt surmise how well that pans out.

Of
course, you realize that this means war, and Wade fires off the first shot when
he catches the older McCluskey son, dimwit Dillard (Ryan O'Nan), stealing from
one of his family's traps. He lures Dillard into inadvertently sticking his foot
into another trap and leaves him. Things quickly escalate between the two sides,
and whatever suspense there is comes from trying to guess which of the more or
less innocent members of the respective families are going to get caught in the
violent crossfire. On the Riley side, there is Wade's lovely and sweet niece
Abigail (Maika Monroe) and nephew Samuel (Owen Teague), a young boy who
idolizes his soldier uncle over the dad who sat out the war. For the
McCluskeys, there is Doris (Beth Broderick), the matriarch who went mad
following the death of another child, and Marcus (Rhys Wakefield), a more
even-tempered son who makes daily excursions to clandestinely canoodle with
Abigail.

Co-writers
John Chriss and Kane Senes have provided a screenplay that consists of one
overly familiar scenario after another, dialogue that strains for poetry at
every turn and misses every time (If one more person made explicit mention of
Wade's search for "peace," I was prepared to begin my own violent
grudge war) and characters who always feel like plot devices instead of actual
people. Senes serves double duty as director, and, as uninvolving as the
screenplay he gave himself is, he does it no favor with a pace so sluggish that
the film feels maybe three times longer than it actually is.

There are
some good actors here but since they have been given neither compelling
characters to play nor plausible dialogue, they more or less look exactly like
what they are—a bunch of actors stuck in
uncomfortable outfits uttering largely unspeakable dialogue. James Badge Dale,
for example, is normally a good actor but his character is so one-dimensional
and uninteresting that he is unable to get anything going with it, not even
when the role takes on a darker tone in the later scenes. Likewise, William
Forsythe is one of those B-movie presences who can usually liven up even the
most substandard of material but he is also stymied by a character built of so
many cliches that he was probably off-book halfway through the first table
read. And anyone going to this film just to see Maika Monroe in her first major
release since her big breakthrough earlier this year as the tormented girl at
the center of the horror knockout "It Follows" will be especially
disappointed to see her marking time in a nothing part that fails to provide
her with any opportunity to show off the acting skills that we know she
possesses in abundance.

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